Sauna Open Air Festival 2011, 9th-11th June Tampere, Finland

The 8th Sauna Open Air festival was celebrated in a very sunny and warm weather, unlike in some other years – and this year the festival also broke their own record, welcoming as many as 26,000 people within the three days.

The SOA festival has truly found an important place among the other Finnish summer festivals, concentrating mostly on old-school Heavy/Thrash Metal and Hard Rock bands – and turning the festival around for the past 3-4 years or so, by booking many internationally big names for the three-day Metal feasts; from Kiss to Megadeth to Dio to Whitesnake to Scorpions to Type O Negatíve – and the list goes on.

This year, the festival organizers had very special grins – wider than ever before, spread all over their faces – and for some very good reasons. Two of the biggest headliners, Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest, arrived at SOA for the first time, with bands like Saxon, Accept, Doro, Cavalera Conspiracy, Joey Belladonna and many others proving to be good company to them.

Read on – the following article is based on the seven most interesting and musically satisfying bands of this year’s festival from your truly point of view.

Sauna Open Air is pretty much the kick-off for the ”Festival Season” here in Finland and the first metal festival of the summer. This year, according to the organizers, there was a total audience of 23.000, with just the first day (Thursday) sold out. There was a feeling that this year’s SOA wasn’t a big hit among the fans. You could see already that from the last two days, which seemed kinda empty. Maybe it was because of the old money issue for the fans or maybe they weren’t that much interested in seeing some bands that seem to play quite often in SOA or other festivals.

Sauna Open Air Metal Festival 2007 entertained approximately 22,000 metal warriors within 3 hot and sunny days. Almost 10,000 people appeared on Saturday, 8th of June, which was undoubtedly the biggest day of the festival thanks to both Dimmu Borgir´s and Type O Negative´s attendance. The Sauna Open Air Metal Festival opened its gates for metalheads for the 4th time in the whole history of this well-organized festival. The settings were probably the best so far for a great, all-aged, metallic event. At least the four main headlining acts that were booked to Sauna 2007 – Megadeth, Dimmu Borgir, Type O Negative and Heaven & Hell – placed four unbeatable aces on the table. It seemed that the impossible had a splendid chance to become possible… and that´s – what I believe, happened eventually.

Two curiosities – and let’s even say, somewhat relatively experienced reporters from Metal-Rules.com – crept through the gates of Sauna Open Air Metal Festival, and the following honest observations were made on the happenings during this metallic feast…

Sauna Open Air festival (see -> http://www.sauna-open-air.fi/news.htm) was held in Tampere, Finland for the 2nd time in the beginning of this June, and this year the organizers had expanded the festival from last year?s one day festival to 3-day festival by gathering together three big names for the festival (Slayer, Dio and Megadeth) that made to move our lazy asses to Tampere for three days, making it overall the kind of festival to any metal dude or dudette who wanted to enjoy some quality acts playing there this year.

Our main plan was to interview Slayer at the Sauna Open Air ?festival (both of us being huge Slayer ?fans), but since their management had told that there?s no point for the Slayer -guys to get interviewed this time by any press people – having no new album out yet or anything, we changed our plans just at the very last minutes and asked a possibility to interview Mr. none-other-but Ronnie James Dio instead.

We got something better than what we originally ordered. Namely the whole band arrived to the backstage area to do the press thing, sat down on the other side of the table, getting ready for an interview and looking amazingly relaxed and comfortable. We put the tape recorder rollin? and started bombing with our questions mainly directed to Ronnie… and here?s the result. Enjoy folks.